33 years ago...

pipsqueak1984@lemmy.ca to Linux@lemmy.ml – 1372 points –
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Just look at those nested parentheses. A true sign of (pedantic) greatness, when a person needs to clarify something in their earlier clarification.

I love it™ (The nested parentheses are one of the greatest tools known to mankind (And to all other creatures))

To paraphrase an old tweet: "parentheses - for when every thought comes with bonus sub-thoughts".

I always tell myself I am reading minds when I read inside parentheses

I have been stopping myself from using those and instead restructure my sentence. But if people like it, guess I can start keeping it.

I do find it more useful, however, to have a kind of a reference to the thing written at the end instead [1], but markdown doesn't seem to have anything for that, and using the syntax for Markdown references, is only useful for hyperlinks, or if the reader is willing to read the hover text 2.

[1]: Like This. I would love it if the markdown viewer would link the above [1] to this line. Maybe with a scrolldown effect.

Lemmy's markdown does actually have footnotes!^[they work like this: ^[text here]]

And automatically numbered too! Nice.

Though for me, instead of a scrolldown effect, it reloads the page on clicking the link. Trying a second time, it does the scrolldown properly. Weird
But that's just an implementation detail and as long as this is standard, I'll just start using it.

Thanks

Well ain't that some shit. It would make my comments more readable to a degree^[not that I'd ever use it]. I also like how they have return links for when you have some monster text wall that nobody would ever read in the first place on this platform.

People like these? I do em all the time but always feel I'm overexplaining.

I've had a teacher in elementary school scream at me for doing so. (Nesting parentheses is forbidden. [You are supposed to use brackets.])

It's wild seeing square brackets for something other than array indexing.

I had a teacher that screamed at me for “taking the lords name in vain…” They’re definitely wrong from time-to-time ;-)

I had a science teacher that told us, "If you sneeze three times and nobody blesses you, the devil takes your soul!"

It's science.

Pretty sure I read that paper a few years back ;-)

What did the teacher say about apostrophes to indicate possession?

No idea… stopped listening after I was adminished for my “god damnit…” ;-)

Some of those parens could've been replaced with commas and retain their meaning (that's what I do to avoid nesting, so that it doesn't get confusing).

You have command of English grammar, clearly.

How's your Finnish?

Not as good as my other primary languages, I have to admit. Finnish has too many consonants for my taste.

Wait until you need nested commas, those lists won't delineate themselves!

Or he could have used brackets.

I've never seen that being used, but it seems it's a thing in English. What if you wanna best deeper? Do you go {}? Then <>? «»?

Not really an English thing so much as a math thing that makes too much sense to not use elsewhere. For instance, in math you might have x[3 - 7{3y + (a * b)}]. I haven't actually seen them go deeper than three sets, though, so I'm not sure what would be next.

at that point I start recycling them, and go back to parenthesis.

so when bp = 300x - 3, this:

4( 4[ 4{ 15bp + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000

would turn to

4( 4[ 4{ 15( 300x - 3) + 10 } - 375 ] - 2250 ) - 15000

perhaps not the best, but I rather stick to conventional symbols rather than using... idk, question marks? that'd be funny as hell, though

just picture it:

4© 4« 4¿ 15bp + 10 ? - 375 » - 2250 🄯 - 15000

The amount of effort I do to try and avoid using double parentesis is trully herculean.

I think that stuff is the product of a completionist/perfectionist mindset - as one is writting, important details/context related to the main train of thought pop-up in one's mind and as one is writting those, important details/context related to the other details/context pop-up in one's mind (and the tendency is to keep going down the rabbit hole of details/context on details/context).

You get this very noticeably with people who during a conversation go out on a tangent and often even end up losing the train of thought of the main conversation (a tendecy I definitelly have) since one doesn't get a chance to go back and re-read, reorganise and correct during a spoken conversation.

Personally I don't think it's an actual quality (sorry to all upvoters) as it indicates a disorganised mind. It is however the kind of thing one overcomes with experience and I bet Mr Torvalds himself is mostly beyond it by now.

perfectionist mindset - as one is writing,

I think an "M-Dash (perfectionist mindest— as one is writing,)" would be more appropriate than an "N-Dash" in your statement. No 'nested' parentheses needed (unless you're looking to add non-essential (though insightful) info to your sentence); but the type of... "PAUSE" makes all the difference

I once did double "parentheses" in speech when started doing streaming year ago, lol.

Thought I was the only one noticed abundance of the parenthesis